An Amorphous and Arsonous Body

How to biographize Elias Canetti, one of the world’s great autobiographers? What account would be useful? What usefulness could also be made beautiful? What should be the relationship between his own version of himself — his own multiple versions — and this? On the one hand, it would be wasteful to spend this introduction previewing the very same information that will be encountered again, in better prose, in the pages to come (and in the hundreds and hundreds of Canetti’s pages that I didn’t include, many of which struck me on certain days as just as worthy of inclusion).